Let me start this paragraph with a completely unoriginal question. What happened to music videos? Surely this is not the first time you’ve heard this complaint, but seriously. I remember in the 80’s when I lived for the world premiere of my favorite artist’s new video. It was a major event and after I watched it, I couldn’t wait to talk about the video the next day with my friends at school.
At this point I can’t remember the last time I saw a video on MTV. I can’t imagine I’ve seen one on the network since 2000 or later. Videos have been replaced by reality shows filled with whiny, spoiled rich kids primping for the camera and dumping/hookingupwith/dumping/repeat their myriad of love interests in a whirlwind of jump cuts as the latest flavor of the month punk/emo band plays on the stereo in the background of their multi-million dollar crash pad. It’s truly ironic that the target demographic for MTV now makes up the majority of the network’s programming and the music that the network once championed is the Muzak® on the set.
These days the best you can hope for is that your video “statement” becomes a viral video and is spread far and wide on the Myspace’s and YouTube’s of the web. YouTube is actually a pretty awesome web site and thank god that bandwidth has improved to a point that you can actually watch music videos again. Maybe YouTube will do for musicians what MTV used to do back in the 80’s, make videos popular as shit and a viable way to promote your band. A guy can dream.
So, for what it’s worth, my band has made a music video. Why? I don’t know, but it was fun to do and didn’t cost us anything. We have some friends who work at Cartoon Network and they offered to shoot us a video for free as a way to pad their “reel”. So, we assembled the day after our album release show last October and shot some digital video. Fast forward a few months and, voila!, the video is done.
So, here’s our video. I think it looks awesome even if it will never be played on MTV. If you like the song, consider buying the album, won’t you? Oh yeah, and before you watch it, imagine that MTV antenna thing with the beep beep beep noise in the background, indicating a world premiere video.